


Temporary

by EntreNous



Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Genre: Abandoned Work - Unfinished and Discontinued, Amnesia, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Muteness
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2005-11-14
Updated: 2006-07-28
Packaged: 2017-12-08 00:02:01
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 13
Words: 20,720
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/754623
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/EntreNous/pseuds/EntreNous
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Post-Chosen, Spike shows up in London, but he’s not the same.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This story filled a number of purposes -- written for aimeelicious, in thanks for her donation through [fandom_charity](http://fandom-charity.livejournal.com/), as an entry in the 2005 fest [fall_for_sx](http://fall-for-sx.livejournal.com/), and finally, was continued as an entry for the 2006 [lynnevitational](http://lynnevitational.livejournal.com/). 
> 
>  
> 
> ~~My standard disclaimer for stories I haven't updated in some time: This particular story stands unfinished, but I do think about it, and hope to finish it one day. As I have no immediate plans to continue it, however, please decide yourself whether you wish to undertake reading something that's very much a work-in-progress at present. If AO3 users want to subscribe to the story in case I do update, that might be best for people who prefer to choose completed fics. Thank you.~~
> 
>  
> 
> ETA, 11/8/2015: Please note I've tagged this story "Abandoned Work - Unfinished and Discontinued". I'm including it with my other archived items on AO3 in part for completion's sake, and in part because if anyone is hoping to find a fic with these characters and this set of tropes, well, here it is, unfinished though it may be. Thank you.

“No way,” Xander said to Buffy furiously.

“But --”

“A world of no. Nuh and uh. Absolutely, positively, n--”

“Xander, if you’d just consider--” she began.

He put his hands on his hips and frowned. “What I want to know is why everyone else thinks that Spike’s in-crisis default mode is at my place? Can’t this change now that my place is on another continent?”

Andrew opened his mouth to say something but shut it again when Xander started to pace along the length of the living room.

“I mean, chip him, and he lounges around the basement, makes fun of me, and steals my stereo. Get the vampire all soul-crazy, and I have to put him up in my closet, keep tabs on his comings and goings, and I’ll thank you _not_ to bring up the almost inevitable jokes associating me and closets.”

“But I wasn’t going to say--” Buffy tried.

“You and closets?” Andrew asked with interest.

“And _then_ ,” Xander said furiously as he came to a halt. “Then he turns up in the middle of Council Headquarters when someone gets a locket in the mail, because apparently that sometimes _happens_ with vampires who died in a blaze of fire. And even though based on everything you’ve told me, he’s gone feral or something way worse, you want me to take him in again? Don’t you think I’ve paid my Spike sitting dues already?”

“Actually,” Andrew started. “Spike’s past history of staying with you in times of trauma would set a precedent of emotional significance. Staying with you could very well come to represent a haven of some sort because of those past associations.” Despite his sense-making proto-Giles speak, he looked way too excited about current events for Xander’s liking.

“Haven schmaven,” Xander said dismissively. “Between the two of you, you can’t cook up even one other Council-sponsored housing situation for our vampire gone wild?”

“He’s not really wild,” Buffy said in a calm voice. “And he did save the world, so do you really think we should just stick him anywhere there’s an empty bed? You’ve got to agree that he deserves more than that.”

“You know, we’ve all saved the world at one time or another,” Xander muttered.

“Oh!” Andrew’s face fell. “I haven’t done that yet.”

“Don’t you worry,” Xander exclaimed in an overly-bright voice. “You just keep on wishing and hoping and eating your green vegetables, and one day you too will avert an apocalypse.”

Andrew cleared his throat uncertainly and Buffy shot Xander an impatient look.

“Okay. I know I can find a bodyguard or a paid companion or some arrangement for him. But I thought that now, since this thing with Nigel has been over for a little while, maybe you could use . . . a distraction.” When Xander said nothing, she pushed a strand of hair behind her ear and went on with determination. “So this would only be temporary. And it would give you some . . . some structure. Until you decide to take another kind of council assignment, set up a project here in London or go overseas again if that’s what you want to do.”

“That -- that was really a thing?” Andrew asked with wide eyes and pink cheeks. “Because I thought, you know, um . . . with Anya . . . and you . . . uh . . . _Nigel_?”

“Thanks ever so much for keeping that little piece of gossip under wraps, Buff,” Xander said sharply.

“I thought everyone knew by now,” Buffy exclaimed, throwing her hands into the air.

“You . . . and Nigel?” Andrew asked weakly. His gaze flittered up and down Xander’s body before resting on his face with keen interest. Xander groaned.

“Well, they’ll know _now_!”

Buffy shook her head. “Fine. I’m sorry. But the point here isn’t whether you and Nigel were in a relationship and living together for five months, or that since he left you haven’t gotten involved in anything, and we’re really worried about you. The point is that --” She stopped short and bit her bottom lip.

“Feral Spike,” Andrew reminded her helpfully.

“Right, feral Spike-- well, no, because like I said, he’s not at all feral. He’s just . . . uh . . .” Buffy gestured lamely. “Confused.”

“Crazy confused?” Xander asked desperately. “Jumping me in the middle of the night and draining me confused? Or is this just more your everyday variety of vampire wacky?”

“Oh, thank you, thank you,” Buffy said eagerly, catching Xander in a tight hug.

“I didn’t say yes yet,” Xander reminded her. But she beamed at him while Andrew stood and bounced on the balls of his feet as though he wanted to join in for a group hug, so clearly the consensus of everyone present was that he pretty much had agreed.

“I promise you he’s 100% harmless,” Buffy declared. “Well, okay, maybe not 100%, but he won’t hurt you. You absolutely have my word.”

“This truly is helpful, Xander,” Andrew said officiously. “Since Buffy has her commitments in other parts of Europe for the next few weeks, and I’m going to be overseeing the training for the most recently identified group of slayers, not to mention Giles’ well-deserved holiday -- well, let’s just say that the Council will not forget the sacrifices that you’ve made.”

“Try not to speak,” Buffy said to him, not unkindly, and Andrew’s cheeks turned pink once more.

“Seriously, Xander, this is a huge favor, and it means a lot to me.” She put her small hand on his arm and looked up into his eyes. “I’m not asking you because it’s easy; I’m asking you because it’s important.”

“Yeah, okay,” Xander said in embarrassment. Somehow Buffy could still make him feel as though he’d run to cover mud-puddles with capes for her, even if he had to make the damn puddles himself and she was too busy kicking ass to step on the cape. “It’s for, what, only a few weeks, right?”

“And you don’t have to do much at all,” she assured him. “We’re going to run all kinds of medical and mystical test on him when the whole team is assembled again, so all you’ve got to do is relax, keep him safe, and enjoy hanging out on the Council’s dollar . . . uh, pound.”

“Hey, you don’t think maybe, you know, you ought to run all of those tests _now_?” Xander asked in a strained voice.

“We have run the more obvious ones already,” Andrew clarified. “Enough to know that if there’s nothing majorly wrong with him.”

“Or that it’s hidden pretty damn well,” Xander said grimly. “But who do I phone if he goes all funny? Is there a bat line, or . . .”

“Andrew’s here, even if he’s busy day-to-day,” Buffy said. “And if you run into anything tricky, the research department and other groups will do whatever they can to help.”

Xander nodded. “All right then. Feeding schedule? Do-s and Don’t-s? Allergies and dislikes that will make him go all fangy?”

Andrew’s eyes brightened. “Blood will be delivered twice daily, a range of varieties, and if you’d like to read up on some literature I’ve put together about what you can expect --” He stopped when Buffy cleared her throat.

“Day to day,” she said simply. “Three weeks. You’ll be fine.”


	2. Chapter 2

Spike arrived the next evening.

“So this is where you’ll sleep,” Xander told him in the guest room while Spike kept his eyes trained on the floor. “Moving on up, right? I mean, at least where sharing an address with me is concerned. You’ve gone from tacky although comfy chair, to closet cot, to basement bed, to the current swank surroundings you see before you.” He gestured at the room around them. Though as far as he could tell Spike didn’t look directly, his head moved, tilted, an angle there, a surreptitious glance there, as Xander rattled on and needlessly pointed out different things.

“So you’ve got a dresser, and a bedside table. And right, a closet. The Council designers -- and did you know the council has their own team of interior designers? -- were here earlier hanging those heavy and hideous drapes.”

Flick of the eyes up, and then Spike went back to studying the patch of rug just in front of his feet.

“They had samples up the wazoo spread out for a while yesterday. And you’d think that they’d have gone with the velvet,” Xander continued. “Seems more like your style. But I guess they checked out the rest of this place, and . . .” He let the sentence hang as he frowned at the non-descript fabric that actually did in many ways match the mostly-bare room. 

There wasn’t so much of a style to fit in with now, particularly after Nigel had left. He had taken what Xander had called his knick knacks, and Willow had called his tchochkes, packed them up with greater care than he’d used telling Xander things were over between them, and headed out. Xander had a feeling Nigel would have liked it a whole lot more if Xander had been the one to leave, but since these were technically Council-owned digs, that wasn’t how the story went. Though Nigel was something of an up and comer in the London branch, he didn’t rate high enough to land a place like this on his own. Not that Xander liked pulling rank and influence otherwise. But as Buffy had said when he first called to ask her if putting him in this particular apartment had been a mistake, in his role as whatever someone would call what he did on Council retainer these days, he was entitled to a nice place. 

Oddly enough, after half a year in Africa and a few weeks visiting and then intervention-dragging an extremely unhappy Willow back to the U.K., he actually did feel sort of entitled. Nice apartment. Great location. Good space. Lots of light. He tried not to think too hard about the fact that Anya would have loved it.

“Do you think he was fucking his way to the top?” Xander had asked Willow suddenly one day as she was examining jars of chutney at Marks & Spencer Foods. 

“Xander,” she admonished him, but with the kind of verging-on-a-giggle voice that he hadn’t heard much of since the fall of their sophomore year. 

“No, really,” Xander continued, nudging her along the aisle towards the teas and jams. “Like he thought he could fast track up by bottoming out -- but hey, what am I saying, ‘to the top’? He was clearly fucking his way to the _middle_.”

“Top, no, top,” she argued. “You’ve got pull, and you’re an important guy around these parts, and . . . wait, Xander, this is just a really weird conversation to be having.” She put down a jar of boysenberry jam and whapped him on the arm. “Okay, so Nigel may have been a little fussy, a little over-ambitious -- but he liked you lots.”

“Funny how he liked me so much and still wanted to leave me,” Xander said in an offhand-voice.

“Do you miss him?” she asked, stopping their progress with a hand pressed gently to his chest.

“No,” he said briskly. “Well, yes,” he conceded a moment later. “Sometimes. I don’t know. That a good answer?”

“It’s a start,” she replied gently.

And he did miss Nigel, at the apartment. In the kitchen, because Nigel had been a hell of a cook. In front of the television on the nights when Nigel would turn away from his pile of work and sit close to Xander on the couch, running his fingertips absently along the inside of Xander’s thigh while they watched _The Kumars at No. 42_.

And he missed him in the bedroom, lying beside him breathing slowly in the middle of the night, suddenly awake and watching Xander with a smile as he shimmied out of whatever he had on.

All of that he missed, for sure. But Nigel at the office, distracted and huffy, Nigel at the movies, voice going thin and annoyed as he talked about why the latest film Xander had thought was swell was in fact a failure, Nigel at restaurants being an asshole to the staff -- no, he didn’t miss any of those things.

Still, Nigel-at-home had kind of trumped the bad stuff for a while. 

“Yeah, sure I miss him,” he said aloud. Then, startled to find Spike standing silently beside him, he ended by clearing his throat. “But hey, got you for a couple of weeks, right?”

Spike said nothing.

“I mean, not like _that_.” Xander laughed nervously, putting his hand on Spike’s arm and then snatching it back. Of course, then he had to put it back again, because Spike was all freaked out and not talking, and he didn’t want to add to the mess of things in his head with _oh, now people are afraid to touch me_.

Spike glanced at the point of contact diffidently and then moved his eyes down again, a kind of sloping, graceful path back to the floor, even as Xander wondered if it was right to think the movement of a gaze could be considered graceful. Then Xander did have to let go, and even take a step back, because he realized he had been rubbing the underside of Spike’s arm with his thumb. 

“How about we fix you up some nice blood?” he asked, wincing at his hearty tone. Spike didn’t answer, but when Xander turned to head towards the kitchen, taking a right out of the room and then following the curve of the hall, he could hear soft footfalls behind him every step of the way.

* * *

The rest of the day passed with no freaky outbursts. Okay, so Xander wasn’t expecting the regular kind of outbursts since Spike wasn’t speaking. But he’d prepared himself for more clearly insane behavior than Spike quietly closing the door to the guest room and not coming out. 

After feeling his nerves on edge and waiting for the other shoe to fall for much of that first day, he finally relaxed when he slept through the night with no huge signals of vampire-run-amok to wake him up.

Half of the following day had passed by the time that Xander finally returned to Spike’s closed door, rapping his knuckles against the wood. During the morning and afternoon he’d busied himself by sanding down a chair he’d bought a few months ago and had until now forgotten to refurbish, and by going through the mail and emails that somehow he’d let pile up in the time since Nigel left. But finally visions of Spike silently lowering himself down a few stories with a set of knotted sheets, running free and crazy into the night, began to prey on Xander’s mind. After all, he’d promised Buffy to look after the guy. 

“Spike,” he said when the door had opened a crack, and he’d pushed it to the rest of the way. “What say we get you fed?” Spike was standing stock-still in the space beside the bed. It was hard to tell if he’d been standing like that for thirty-six hours, or if he’d jumped to his feet when Xander knocked and posed as a statue after nudging the door open. But at least his eyes were focused on the laces of Xander’s sneakers (trainers, Xander’s mind corrected itself) instead of on the floor. “Well, hey, two inches up,” Xander observed. “That’s an improvement, right?” 

For a moment, just before he turned to lead the way to the kitchen and his now formidable supply of human blood in the refrigerator, he thought he saw the edges of Spike’s lips turn up into a ghost of a smile.


	3. Temporary

Once Spike had been blood-fortified, he started to explore his surroundings ever so slightly. Apparently that meant cautiously examining all the hidden areas of his room. First he felt along the walls and the closet with steady thumps in the middle of the night, giving Xander dreams of wrecking balls until he stumbled into the guest room to see why there was construction happening in the middle of his apartment. The next day Spike got under the bed, apparently to make sure that area was secure. The only sign Xander got that it had happened was when Spike answered his call to come out and drink his blood, and emerged from the room covered with dust bunnies so big that Xander immediately cursed and called a cleaning service.

Buffy had been right about one thing. Spike wasn’t feral at all. If anything, he seemed wary and skittish, like an animal that had been domesticated a while back but had then been forced to live outside for too long. Now it was as though he had been rescued and placed in a new home, with a new owner who he was unsure of, and Xander did _not_ want to keep on pursuing his awful analogy because no way was he going to put a collar around Spike’s neck and give him cat toys.

Instead he decided that looking after Spike might as well include getting Spike acclimated to being out in the normal world, where people looked each other in the eye instead of examining one another’s shins. So the next night Xander took Spike’s arm and led him outside for the first time. Okay, Spike had obviously been around people and driven in a van, because that was how the eight-person task force had dropped him off at Xander’s place. Funny how the Council had thought a bunch of people needed to transport Spike and only one person needed to look after him.

Anyway, as far as Xander knew this was the first time that Spike would be meandering around streets past humans since he’d been “recorporealized” (as Andrew, on the phone one day to ask about how Spike was doing, had dubbed the way he had poofed out of the amulet into Giles’ office).

Xander had thought about it some during the day and had decided that it would be good for Spike to get outside. Well, more like it would be good for him, considering staying indoors and keeping a listening ear open for any signs of panic or insanity was making him jittery.

But he figured that it was a healthy move for Spike to get adjusted sooner instead of later. He chose byways and sidewalks that were brightly lit and crowded with people passing through regularly, though nothing too mobbed or frenetic. Of course, he didn’t know for sure that Spike actually had any kind of problem with crowds, hustling, and/or bustling. Maybe it’d be a kind of . . . test, though, and Xander could report back to the Council’s team assigned to investigate Spike: _Yes, it was both fascinating and telling, the way Spike started frothing at the mouth when we happened upon a pigeon._

But Spike didn’t react to the pigeons much at all. No reeling back in alarm or visible panic at anything they encountered, actually. Maybe he walked a little closer to and a little behind Xander than most people would. And maybe a few times, when people around them laughed loudly or shouted to their friends across the way, Xander felt Spike’s shoulder brush against his arm, as though making contact to touch base and settle his nerves. Xander would have chalked it up to the standard bumping into the person next to him, but Spike carried himself too deliberately for any touch to be an accident.

Of course, that meant Xander had to take a moment wondering why the hell Spike thought Xander was the one to make him feel less anxious.

In any case, whatever was going through Spike’s head, he followed Xander willingly enough to a neighborhood pub. He even sat obediently at the table he’d been stationed at while Xander got the bartender to pull them two pints, and didn’t show any indications that he was going to bolt.

“So what happened?” Xander asked when he had set down the glasses and joined Spike at the table. Weirdly enough, he hadn’t felt inclined to press Spike about what he’d been through any of the days they’d been in the flat together. Partly it had been the way Buffy had sold him on this caretaker deal. Based on what she said it didn’t seem like he was supposed to worry much about Spike getting back in the swing of things, or anteing up a description of his adventures inside the amulet. But now at the bar, something about the steady hum of conversation around them made Xander feel as though questions were in order.

Spike examined the grain of the wooden table and took a sip of his beer. After he had carefully lifted, sipped, and replaced the glass a dozen times, Xander took a breath.

“Thought maybe I could get you to talk,” Xander observed after half of his own beer was gone. “Sure, you haven’t talked at all yet, but what the hell, I thought I’d ask anyway. You know, it’s the perfect suspense movie solution. The unassuming companion opens up the floodgates for the silent and tormented tragic figure with a simple yet provocative question. ‘What happened’ -- it’s a beauty, right? Plus, you know, I was thinking that since alcohol is the great conversational lubricant, it might get you a little more loosey-goosey with the info.” He swiped at the moisture that had collected on the table, and replaced his drink on the coaster.

Spike said nothing. Xander took another sip of his stout. “No dice though, I guess.”

Spike didn’t look up, but Xander thought that he seemed interested. Okay, it was difficult to say that Spike was anything in particular when all he was doing was blinking occasionally and tracing the worn edges of his coaster with a jagged fingernail. But Xander was prepared to take the slightest gesture as participation in the conversation.

“But it could just be that it’s not the _right_ simple question,” Xander said with a snap of his fingers. Spike didn’t react to the noise visibly, though his tracing action slowed.

“So who knows?” Xander continued. “One day Willow might drop by -- and you should know that she drops by when she’s in the city, because locks cannot keep that woman out of any place she wants into, and I myself have been known to shriek like a girl when she shows up out of nowhere while I’m shaving or having some private time. So say she comes in, and I ask her about something. Just a random question, about spells or covens, or even about something that happened when we were in high school. Right there -- that could be the thing, the spark that makes you turn your head, raise your eyes, and open your mouth to tell us the entire story from beginning to end. You’re picking up what I’m laying down, right?”

Nothing.

Xander wiped a finger alongside the length of the glass and then examined the his hands. “I must be the only one that watches those movies anymore. Okay. Still got the soul?”

No movement. In fact, Spike seemed to have curled further against his chair, almost pulling into himself just enough that he looked smaller and less threatening. There had been no visible motion, but he was less . . . less there.

Xander frowned. “Still in love with Buffy?”

Nada.

“Still think Angel is a jerk who has stupid hair?”

No reaction.

“Still --” Xander stopped himself. He looked at his hands on the table, at Spike’s carefully poised and diminished posture. An odd feeling hit the pit of his stomach. “Hey. Spike. Do you know who I am?”

Nothing. Then . . . at first it seemed like an involuntary twitch. But no, Spike was actually shaking his head, if turning it back and forth a single time counted.

Xander sat back and took a deep breath. “All right. Know who _you_ are?”

A longer pause. Then that same movement. Back and forth, two times now, a slow but sure shake of the head.

“Well, fuck,” Xander said under his breath.

Spike looked up sharply. It happened so fast, just a jerk of the head up to eye-to-eye level, then back down to the table, that for a moment Xander imagined he had fooled himself into seeing it.

He nodded slowly. “Okay, but do you know that you’re . . . ” The buzz of talk rose and fell around them. He coughed, and tried again.

“Spike. Do you know _what_ you are?” In answer, he got a blink-and-you’d-miss-it glimmer: a face that shifted definition, blue eyes that speckled with gold, and just-parted lips displaying incisors that became marginally sharper. Oh yeah. Spike knew that part of it.

“Right,” Xander said. He shook his head, because how Spike had figured out that key bit of information when he didn’t know anything else made little sense to him. Then again, the guy had been drinking blood at regular intervals for at least the past few days. That might have been a major load-of-bricks kind of clue.

Xander finished his beer without any more words. After a moment of stillness, Spike followed suit, sipping at his glass until it was nearly empty.

“Let’s get out of here and go home,” Xander said. It just seemed natural that he would nudge Spike out of his chair. And it seemed perfectly normal that he would follow him to the street, guiding him on the walk with a hand splayed against the small of Spike’s back, fingers and thumbs gently pressing, reassuring.

Xander very deliberately decided not to ask himself just which of them was supposed to be the one who was reassured.


	4. Temporary

The next morning Xander called Andrew at the Council.

“I’m afraid only a grave emergency can pull him out of this critical meeting,” said the young man who answered the phone.

“This counts,” Xander said.

There was a delicate pause, a few clipped words, and after a long time on hold Xander finally got Andrew on the other end.

“Xander, I am so sorry,” Andrew started off. “Timothy, my assistant -- he’s new, and he didn’t realize who he was talking to. I’ve made it very clear that he is always to put you through when you call me at work.”

“Well, okay. Thanks,” Xander said. He cleared his throat awkwardly. “Listen, Andrew . . . it’s about Spike. Something happened last night, and I need you--”

“I’ll be right over,” Andrew interrupted in a breathless voice.

“--need you to answer a few questions,” Xander told the dial tone.

Twenty minutes later Andrew marched inside with an armload of dusty books, a mini-cooler full of bagged blood, and the idea that Xander was going to be a quivering wreck. Xander felt almost bad that he couldn’t seem like more of a mess for Andrew’s sake.

“Hi,” he offered as Andrew dropped his offerings on the floor, gripped Xander’s arms tightly, and then threw his arms around him in a hug.

“You don’t seem hurt,” Andrew said. He patted Xander down anxiously until Xander stepped away.

“No, I’m not hurt at all. Listen --”

“I thought maybe he’d attacked you,” Andrew explained. “You know, I was there the last time Spike was driven mad. Mad by the demons of his past.” He stopped. “By that of course I mean _figurative_ demons.”

“Not so figurative, really,” Xander said. “What with The First in the mix, and Spike chomping on you because of the trigger song he kept hearing. And I don’t think Drusilla and Angelus were ever anything other than literal.”

“Exactly,” Andrew said with a wise nod.

Xander scratched the back of his neck. “So. When Spike showed up at Council offices, was there anything unusual that happened?”

Andrew’s expression became slightly cagey. “I’m not exactly sure of the answer to that.”

“Would Giles know if we called him? Or Buffy, was she there when it happened?”

“No one saw him show up,” Andrew answered.

Xander blinked. “Come again?”

“Someone in the mail room got the padded envelope that had the amulet in it,” Andrew explained. “It didn’t say fragile or anything on it; it just had the Council address and Giles’ name. So I guess he tossed it on the desk and kept making his rounds. Giles had asked me to meet with him that afternoon.” Andrew paused until Xander nodded to show he understood the significance of this. “When we went into the office a few moments after the mail room worker had left, Spike was in the room, full game face, but standing totally still.”

“Boy, I bet that casual envelope tossing made Giles pissed,” Xander said. “ _American_ pissed.”

“Definitely,” Andrew replied.

After a moment, Xander walked into the living room and sat down on the couch. “Spike doesn’t know who he is,” he said finally. “Not just that, he doesn’t know who we are.”

Andrew frowned as he followed. “I don’t think there are any records of vampires who have experienced amnesia, but I’ll consult with our research staff immediately and --”

Xander cut him off. “It’s not just the forgetting. That standing still thing -- that seems really off.”

“Yes,” Andrew agreed. He shifted from one foot to the other before moving to join Xander on the couch. “Why?”

“Because I’ve never seen a vampire that didn’t dig itself out of a grave and come out ready for some kung fu fighting,” Xander explained. “Enough patrols, and you get the idea -- these are guys whose M.O. is all about moving right into the offensive position. So even if Spike was trapped like a genie in a lamp, even if he can’t remember who he is or what happened to him, I would have bet good money on him coming out of that amulet with his dukes up.”

“I see your point,” Andrew answered with a frown. “I’ll take care of the research end, but you’ll have to tell me everything you can learn from observation. You’re in the best position for it, with Spike here all of the time. Watch Spike’s every move, and take careful note of how he behaves over the next few days, especially now that we know about the blocked memories. Meanwhile, I’ll spear-head the investigation into the Council’s records on vampire behavior in times of trauma.”

* * *

After Andrew’s visit, Xander had gone into heightened alert around Spike. So far Spike hadn’t displayed of what Xander had seen in nature documentaries or crappy movie of the week dramas as clearly freaked out behavior. No rocking, no hiding in corners, no sudden halts, rearing back like a scared colt at the unfamiliar.

Spike was just . . . quiet. Definitely quiet with the not-speaking, but quiet in movement and overall Spike-y-ness too. He read things if Xander put them in his hands. He went places when Xander guided him out of the apartment. He watched whatever television show Xander had turned on. But he didn’t seem to initiate anything on his own, and he didn’t appear to want anything in particular that Xander didn’t dangle in front of him first.

He still didn’t look at Xander directly. However, the constant attention (something that would have made Xander antsy) seemed to make him a little more comfortable, as though Xander’s continual focus on him made him feel wanted or welcome to make himself at home. He even lifted his gaze bit by bit. Two days after the first time they went to the pub, they got to kneecaps. And the progress kept up, enough that Xander thought privately that he could hope for chin-level staring by the time Buffy rolled back into town.

“How’s the patient?” Willow asked him cheerfully when she called a few days later.

“The same,” Xander said. He’d emailed her the details about his conversation with Spike in the pub, and she knew about Andrew’s little research project. But she kind of had her hands full with the problems in Warwick, so he wasn’t surprised that this was the first time they had connected on the phone.

A slew of corpses missing left ears had led Willow to Warwick, and the presence of a suitably chagrined junior-ish coven-type group of kids without much awareness of all things witch-y or adult guidance (“Xander, half of them haven’t even taken their GCSEs yet!!”) had kept her for a little while longer. Most of what he knew about what had gone down came from emails, but even so, Xander could practically taste the scolding that Willow had given the bunch of them.

But today was the first time that she’d called with that familiar “I’m all yours,” tone to her voice, and so Xander had let himself scootch down in the chair until he was half-reclining and settled in for a long talk.

"He's still not talking? Has he remembered anything?" she prodded.

“He’s . . .” he hesitated.

“Drinking his blood all up?” she asked.

“Yeah. He’s eating. When I remind him.”

She made a little hmm-ing inquisitive noise.

“Mixed,” he said. “Some of it human, some of it types of what I can assume came from the non-fluffy sort of creatures. I don’t know what the Council has got going in their platelet cocktail. He drinks it down, and . . . you know, I hadn’t really thought about it before, but I don’t think he changes when he feeds.”

“Doesn’t get even a little bumpy?” she asked.

He chewed his lip as he thought. “Nary a bump,” he answered finally, shifting a little.

“He in the room with you now?” Willow asked. “Because, oh, you could ask him -- so check out the expression when you do this -- ask him whether --”

“Nah, he’s in his room. The guest room, I mean,” Xander corrected himself. “He stays wherever he’s led or told. Doesn’t wander around, doesn’t poke into things he shouldn’t. He doesn’t do much of anything, really. Though I’ve gotten him to come out with me to bars or restaurants, and he seems okay with that. It’s kind of freaking me out.”

“So he doesn’t do anything. Unless you tell him to,” Willow said.

Xander nodded to himself for a moment before he groaned. “Oh fuck, you mean, I should . . . if I told him he could change or do whatever he wanted, maybe he’d do it?”

“It’s worth a try,” Willow said gently. “We still don’t know where he’s been, what he . . . had to do . . .”

“And how messed up is that?” Xander asked. “Listen -- can I call you back when --”

“Go,” she said without a pause, and they hung up.

Xander knocked for form’s sake and then entered to find Spike in the chair by the window, staring out at the now-darkened sky. At least it was better than standing at attention.

“Hey,” Xander said, and Spike shifted ever so slightly, as though debating whether to stand to face Xander.

“Listen, Spike,” Xander started. He sighed and then walked over and dropped down to sit on the mattress.

Something flitted across Spike’s face -- the barest suggestion of surprise, the ghost of a worried expression. But then it was gone, and he looked at Xander’s chest in an almost affectionate way.

“I know you’re a little . . .” Xander started. He almost laughed. What he knew about Spike, this Spike, was almost nothing. “I know you’re a little spooked,” he concluded.

Spike appeared to be waiting to hear more.

“But I want you to know, you can . . . do what you want to here.”

A twitch. Xander decided that was enough of an indication of Spike’s old expression of skeptical eyebrow-raising to push ahead.

“Let’s start with easy reasonable stuff,” Xander offered. “When you’re hungry, whenever you want to eat -- you just go ahead and get as much blood from the fridge as you like. There’s not a limit -- I can always get more for you.”

The barest dip of Spike’s head, and Xander took a quick breath, because hell, if that hadn’t been a nod then he didn’t know what was.

“And you can go anywhere you want. Um, in the apartment for now, okay? Not that I think you’re going to head over to Bloomsbury and terrorize pedestrians, but maybe until we work out more of a . . .” He trailed off. A schedule? An understanding of what Spike might do next? A trust that if Spike left the apartment on his own, he’d actually return?

“Anywhere in the apartment,” Xander continued with more confident than he felt. “That sound good to you?”

The merest displacement of air, and Xander would have put some good money that he’d seen a version of Spike’s head-tilt.

“Okay,” Xander said. He felt relieved, and though it was a surprise when Spike dipped his head once more, seemingly in agreement, that made him feel even better. “Okay.”


	5. Temporary

There was progress. Of course, the progress happened at a slug’s pace, but Xander kept reminding himself that it still was progress.

After Xander kept insisting that Spike could really and truly do what he liked around the apartment, Spike did actually start to fix himself blood at odd times instead of only when Xander reminded him. And sometimes he would join Xander watching television without Xander asking, or look pointedly at the door in a clear indication that he thought going out for a beer would be a fine idea. Once he had even heaved a great sigh when they’d arrived at one of the two pubs they frequented, and that was enough for Xander to get that Spike liked the other one more. So, progress.

“It’s just really incredibly weird,” Buffy had said when Xander had finished telling her the latest developments over the phone.

“Okay, Spike showing up at Council headquarters here, weird. The fact that we don’t know exactly where he’s been between Sunnydale sinking in the ground and poofing out of the amulet, very weird. But this --”

“Not remembering anything? Any of us? That’s weird. And finding that out even though he can’t talk: that’s the weirdest,” she insisted.

He sighed. “To me that’s just the icing on top of a very weird cake. And can we stop arguing about the level of weird here? I’m more worried that I can’t figure out what’s up with him, that things are happening so slowly.”

“Sorry,” she said, and he could almost hear her square her shoulders in that get-serious way she had. “Xander, I’m glad it’s you who’s focused on this.”

“Right. The get-Xander-a-hobby project. Spike-sitting is taking my mind of the breakup,” Xander said flatly.

“No,” she interrupted. “Because I knew I could count on you for help with Spike, knew I trusted you to do it more than anyone else. But I never thought we’d learn this much so quickly, that you would reach him and figure out some of what’s going on in his mind.”

“Buffy, come on. Did you miss the part where this is all very much on the baby-steps level? He still isn’t looking me in the eye. He’s very much with the silent vampire act. And I’ve hardly found out anything at all.”

“Think about it, Xander. It’s only been a week and a half between Spike appearing and now. Maybe things are going slowly, but who knew there would be any progress at all? And it’s not true, what you said. You’ve found out so much already.”

Xander gripped the phone a little tighter. There was a long pause.

“How much are you getting out these days?” she asked abruptly.

“What, we have to get back on my lack of love life just when you were telling me what a great job I’ve done? Way to cut a guy down, Buff.”

She laughed. “It’s not that.”

“Hang on. Give me a second here while I bask in your pride.” Xander exhaled noisily, and she giggled. “We went out for a beer just last night,” he said finally by way of answering her question.

“No, I mean -- you getting out on your own, Spike-less.”

Spike walked through the room just then. He cast a glance over at Xander, and then went to sit by the windows that were quickly darkening in the onset of twilight.

“I’m fine,” Xander said distractedly as he watched as Spike reach out and draw the drapes back. Spike touched the window with his fingertips, tilting his head to watch the activity on the street below. “You’ll be back soon enough, Giles will head home after his vacation even sooner. And then we’ll figure out, you know, what happens next.”

“Right,” she agreed. Her tone was full of tenderness. “Xander. I really am proud of you.”

“Yeah, okay,” he answered with some embarrassment.

And he did feel better after talking to her. The conversation let him wonder if he really had gotten through to Spike in some small way.

But it was hardly a surprise when a group email addressed to Andrew came around the next morning, cc’ing Willow and Giles along with Xander, and saying that Buffy thought Andrew should take on some of the Spike sitting.

* * *

Every other day or so, Andrew would come by for a round of Spike-watching. Andrew insisted that he was glad to get away from the office for a few hours. “The pressure of handling the top cases while Giles is out of town is really intense,” Andrew had sighed dramatically, eyeing Xander to make sure he heard the “top cases” part. The first few times Xander found himself on the sidewalk in front of his building blinking at sunlight and trying to remember what exactly he’d gotten up to when it was just him. But the new schedule felt kind of normal soon enough, and Xander ended up using the time to run errands, take a long walk, or sit in a pub watching a beer.

“So what kinds of things are you telling Spike?” Xander asked as he joined the two of them at the kitchen table one day. He’d already returned to the flat a time or two to the sound of Andrew chattering away, so he guessed there was some type of running commentary going on. He’d vaguely entertained the thought of setting up a camera, only to catch Spike’s expression reacting to Andrew’s earnest conversation. “Are you explaining about Sunnydale?”

Spike got up and headed in the direction of his room, most likely to fall asleep, as he seemed to do in the late afternoon lately.

“Oh, I’m working up to Sunnydale and the Last Great Battle on the Boca Del Inferno,” Andrew explained. He moved as though to offer Xander some of the tea he had made, but Xander waved him off, gesturing with the half-full bottle of water in his hand. “So right now I’ve been focusing on telling him about what we now know of the history of vampires, slayers, and the way the world was once dominated by demons.”

Xander stared before taking a healthy swig of the water. “Starting off with the basics, huh?”

“I have this theory,” Andrew said excitedly. “The corrupted demon that exists in the vampire has an ancient memory that is transferred into the human host overtaken by the possession enabled by the sharing of blood. So if I tell Spike about some of these accounts of ancient times, it could trigger that primordial vampire inside, the first to mix his blood with that of a human, and make Spike understand what he’s done and what he’s been through.”

“Okay,” Xander said after a pause. “You’re trying to rile up his demon subconscious, and poke at the vampire connection see if that triggers his memory of whatever happened between Sunnydale and now.”

“Yes,” Andrew said. He’d become slightly pink while explaining all of it.

Xander nodded. “Hey. Do you think that other stuff would jog his memory too, besides the demons-to-humans narrative?”

Andrew’s eyes widened. “What kind of stuff? You don’t want me to track down and ensnare Drusilla to bring her to London, do you?”

“God, no,” Xander said quickly. “That’s a whole other kettle of psychic, crazy fish. No, I was just thinking, much as vampires might like history lessons and hearing about demon lineage, don’t they like fighting even more?”


	6. Temporary

“Fighting?” Andrew asked. He patted his chest self-consciously. “You mean, like, sparring? Because I don’t know if I’d be the best one for that--”

“No, I was thinking more your basic garden-variety patrolling. You know, sharpen a few stakes, find a nice infested graveyard. Kill us up a couple of vampires.”

Andrew straightened in his chair before reaching to pour himself another cup of tea. “Xander, I don’t know if I can let you do that. Go patrolling with Spike.”

“Why the hell not?” Xander demanded in a sharp voice. Sure, he hadn’t been patrolling in a long while, because Nigel hadn’t especially liked him doing it. And he hadn’t wanted to miss the hours that Nigel was actually around, which tended to be those of peak patrolling time. Then after Nigel . . . Xander was hard pressed to remember why exactly he’d backed off from all things slaying-related in the in period between Nigel leaving and Spike arriving.

Andrew waved his hands in a kind of we-come-in-peace display. “No, Xander, not that you can’t patrol. Of course not! But Spike, he’s not what I’d call predictable these days.”

Xander crossed his arms. “Yeah, well. Spike’s never been exactly what you’d call predictable. I don’t see why that should stop me taking him out.”

“Well, okay. Let’s think about the fact that he doesn’t know who he is. How about the part where he can’t tell us what exactly happened to him?” Andrew shook his head. “What if you make a kill, a demon or a vampire, and the blood lust makes him attack you? Or, what if a group of demons advances on you, and he just stands around while you get squished?”

“I’m not going to get squished,” Xander said irritably.

“At least take one of the slayers with you. And I’ll come along, just to make sure everything goes all right.”

* * *

Which was how two nights later Xander found himself tramping through a cemetery with Spike, Andrew, and Lydia, a sixteen year old Slayer from Shenzhen.

“It’s like the Orlando of China!” she had shouted with a wide smile when Xander had first met her a few months ago and asked her about where she had grown up. “Special Economy Zone for business and tourism!” He’d cringed at the volume, but soon after learned not to take it personally when he figured out that Lydia tended to shout nearly everything she said.

He’d suggested to Andrew that the whole screaming level of conversation might be a bit much for Spike, asking if they could bring along one of the other girls who was a little less . . . less Lydia for that first patrol. But Andrew seemed to think that Lydia’s habit of decking herself out in proto-punk duds (acquired since she’d settled in London) would be another factor that might give Spike a memory nudge.

“Plus, she’s Chinese,” Andrew had added rather unnecessarily. “That might remind Spike of the first Slayer he killed.”

“And we’d want him to remember that and attack Lydia why?” Xander had asked.

“He won’t attack her,” Andrew had scoffed. “He has the soul now.”

“Probably,” Xander had muttered under his breath.

So in preparation, he’d spent most of the last two days explaining to Spike how much Spike liked killing things. Spike had listened to this running monologue respectfully, his eyes pitched somewhere around Andrew’s abdomen and Xander’s crotch when the two of them play-acted a scene of slayage for him. Andrew had volunteered to be the vampire, and had staged a performance when Xander had fake-staked him that ended with Andrew shrieking out his death throes and tossing a handful of sand in the air to simulate dusting.

Spike had been particularly fascinated with that spray of dirt and grit, moving within reaching distance to Andrew and warily tracing a finger through the layer of sand as though he was skimming the surface of a pool of water. When Andrew got up, Spike jumped to his feet, apparently startled, but then had remained still while Xander and Andrew replayed the scene again.

On the arranged night, they set off to meet Andrew and Lydia at the cemetery entrance, Spike hovering near and orbiting Xander in a way that was both subtle and sure.

“You try to put a stake to his chest?” Lydia asked bluntly just after they were introduced and Spike was still blinking at her leather miniskirt and calf-high Docs. “Bet he’d talk then!” She flashed a toothy grin and combed her fingers through her hot pink hair.

“We’re not going to try that tonight,” Xander answered her. “Just keep an eye out for the other monsters, okay?”

“Yeah, okay,” she yelled, suddenly cheerful as she strode ahead of the pack.

“And she doesn’t scare the vampires _away_ ,” Xander asked Andrew in an undertone.

“Um, no. They kind of come running,” Andrew whispered back.

Sure enough, Lydia only had to call out a few taunts, sing a snatch of a Cantonese pop song, or loudly advise Andrew that he needed to find himself a man, and vampires zoned in on her like she was an irresistible force. It helped that London vamps seemed to skulk around alone instead of in clumps (Xander had some incredibly unfun memories of the coordinated teams of vampires he’d encountered in Kenya). Lydia got to take them down one by one, engaging in a bit of primping and gossiping in between slays.

“I will go to the club after this,” she announced after the fourth staking. “The DJ there, he wants to fuck me, but I am making him wait. You all come too!”

“I’m thinking not tonight,” Xander replied. “Just this little outing is kind of big on the excitement scale for me and Spike lately.”

“So boring,” Lydia shouted disdainfully as she went ahead after the fifth vampire who had just popped up from behind a tall tombstone. Andrew hurried after her with Spike following.

Xander opened his mouth to object that hey, he was _not_ at all boring when two things stopped him. First, he was struck with the thought that maybe he was kind of dull these days. Second, he was pulled tight around his waist by a meaty arm, forcing him to choke silently as he gasped for air.

“Well, then,” a low voice said in his ear. “Out for a bit of fun tonight, are we?”

Xander’s skin prickled even before the tips of the vampire’s fangs brushed his throat. When he felt the first pang of contact, he tried to buck backward to knock the vampire loose.

“Come on now, handsome,” the vampire scolded him. He pulled back slightly, his lips against Xander’s ear before he licked the lobe. “Just want a little taste.”

Then Xander started choking again for an entirely different reason: his lungs were full of dust. In the confusion of falling forward, he imagined that Lydia must have circled around when she’d dispatched her other vampire. Still, because he was now face-down on the ground with a weight on his back that didn’t let him move, his body stayed in panic mode. So he struggled to no avail for a moment until he realized that he was in fact okay.

Because it hadn’t been Lydia who’d dusted the vampire. No, it was Spike who had apparently taken his staking lessons to heart, and who was currently stretched across Xander’s back, pinning him down and snarling at Lydia and Andrew whenever either of them attempted to get closer.

“Spike!” Andrew yelped. “That’s . . . all right now, that’s a good Spike! Get off of Xander, all right?”

“He does not hurt him,” Xander heard Lydia shout. Whether she was really trying to reassure Andrew or if she was bored with patrolling and ready to move on to the club and her DJ boyfriend, though, Xander couldn’t tell.

“Hey,” Xander croaked out as soon as he got enough air in his lungs and could speak once more. “Spike, it’s okay. I’m okay.”

Immediately Spike stopped snarling. A moment later, he was up and already at a safe distance away as he watched Xander clamber to his feet.

“Oh, Xander -- are you okay?” Andrew asked. He seemed disinclined to get near enough to check, wavering on his feet and watching Spike with wide eyes even though Spike’s face was now arranged in a mask of studied blankness.

“Spike got that last one, huh?” Xander asked.

“He kill him so fast,” Lydia confirmed loudly.

“Do you think we could get him to do it again?” Andrew asked. He put one hand over his heart. “I mean, not that I would risk putting you in danger, Xander. But to see if Spike would slay now that he’s, uh, gotten the hang of it? It could help him remember nights of killing and rampaging past. And I could videotape it! Oh, except that I forgot to bring my digital camera.” He patted the pockets of his tweed jacket with a woeful expression.

“He maybe will not kill other vampires anyway,” Lydia proclaimed. “Just I think ones that try to kill Xander.”

Xander took a deep breath, standing with his hands shoved deep in his pockets. Spike remained still, studying the grass that had been pressed flat in the brief struggle.

“In any case, this is an extremely significant development,” Andrew said with his hands clasped together. “Now we’ll have to wait and see if any of that _mano a mano_ sparks Spike’s memories. I say we bring Spike out patrolling again in a few days. Meanwhile, I have _got_ to get home and write all of this up so that I can fax an unofficial update to Giles.”

Andrew marched off officiously, while Lydia fell into step beside him, contributing her thoughts on the matter in her clipped and hearty yell.

Xander exhaled. “Thanks,” he said to Spike in a quiet voice. “You did good tonight, and . . . thanks.”

Spike, unsurprisingly, didn’t reply.

But as they walked home together, whenever Xander looked away, he could feel a sharp gaze fixed on him.


	7. Temporary

It took a long while for Xander to get to sleep that night.

When they got back from patrol with Lydia and Andrew, Xander had gone to the bathroom to clean up the still-running trickle of blood on the side of his neck. While he was there, he hunted around for and found a cold pack for the knee he’d landed on when Spike brought him down to the ground.

His hands shook as he smoothed the adhesive tape around the gauze against his skin for the umpteenth time. Funny thing, having to patch himself up because of something like that. For all the walls he’d been thrown against and the different thumps he’d gotten to the head or ribs during his years of patrolling, he’d never had a vampire bite him before tonight.

Spike must have headed straight for his room, because the rest of the apartment was empty and silent by the time Xander finished up. But even though the light in the guest bedroom was off, Xander still hesitated by Spike’s door, listening for sounds of restlessness. It wasn’t like he knew specifically what he would say to Spike if Spike was still awake, but it seemed strange to end the night this way.

Of course, it could be that Spike was just exhausted and asleep already, even though Xander was all wound up. Because despite the plan to have some standard-issue patrolling, to Xander’s way of thinking the night had been a pretty big one for Spike. Patrolling with one of the new slayers, killing a vampire who’d almost managed to drain a human, not to mention holding Xander down like he was a hurt animal that Spike was bound to protect from predators -- it all spelled memorable evening, especially for a guy who didn’t have any memories.

And what had that been all about, Spike holding Xander down after he dusted the vampire? Not that Xander wasn’t grateful for the life saving. But the idea that Spike wasn’t so interested in killing except when the target had been threatening Xander’s life . . . that part was a little new. And kind of freaky.

So thoughts of the newness kept him up, and the memory of those fangs sinking into his skin prompted more wakefulness. He tossed and turned while random ideas about vampires and DJs flitted through his mind. After a while, he decided that he might as well just get up so that he could email Willow with the details.

But he must have gone to sleep anyway, because then he was waking up, staring at the bedside alarm clock that read 4a.m., and blinking at Spike, who was standing in the doorway to Xander’s bedroom.

“Spike?” Xander asked in a hoarse voice.

Spike closed the door behind him before he moved to the side of the bed. After a beat, he perched on the edge of the mattress.

“Hey,” Xander whispered. He shook his head, and began to wake up more fully. “You okay? Did you want to . . . talk about tonight?”

Spike reached out and rested the tips of his fingers on Xander’s blanket-covered foot. He shook his head.

“Have a bad dream or something?” Xander asked. He slid up, leaning against the headboard, and somehow even though he was more asleep than awake he intuited that Spike found this development -- Xander moving away from his touch -- mildly disappointing. Which was crazy, because since when did this version of Spike go around touching Xander at all? Discounting tonight when he’d been all about tackling and covering Xander with his entire body, of course.

Brief shake of the head, and Xander suppressed the absurd urge to congratulate Spike on expressing himself clearly.

They stared at each other for a few moments. Well, Xander stared, and Spike examined Xander’s chin.

“Can’t sleep though, huh? Me either,” Xander told him. Spike shook his head again, slowly, and looked down at his hands in his lap.

“C’mere,” Xander said suddenly, and just like that, Spike was easing onto the bed, sliding up in what might have been an intricate pattern if it had left a mark on the comforter. Xander held the covers back without much thought, and Spike moved under them in the blink of an eye.

It seemed pointless standing on ceremony y then. So Xander lifted his arm in a clear welcome. After a moment’s hesitation, Spike settled on his chest. In less time than that wordless exchange had taken, they were both asleep.

* * *

In the morning Xander unthinkingly dropped a kiss on that head facing his, the one whose body he was currently curled around and holding.

A cool hand covered his. He breathed in and out for a moment before he recognized the significance of that. Spike, who still couldn’t look him directly in the eye, was not only with him in bed but tugging Xander’s arm ever so slightly to get Xander to tighten his hold.

“This okay with you?” Xander asked gruffly.

No answer. Obviously. But then long tapered fingers stroked against the webbing between his fingers in a rhythmic, comforting fashion. Xander edged forward and fell back to sleep.

* * *

When he woke up again, he was alone in bed. It didn’t seem so far fetched that he might have dreamed everything that had happened after they had returned to the apartment last night. But after a while he heard sounds in the kitchen, so he headed in that direction to find Spike sitting at the table and calmly sipping something from a mug.

“Morning,” Xander offered.

Spike raised his head in an elegant arc and . . . looked Xander in the eye.

“Hey,” Xander said. Too heartily obviously, because Spike dropped his gaze lower before even a beat had passed. Still, it seemed like progress. When Xander had made coffee and joined Spike at the table, the vampire didn’t skitter away or appear to draw back in that must-make-self-less-conspicuous kind of way.

The day that followed was the oddest yet since Spike had arrived to set up house with Xander. Spike sat around thumbing through a magazine that Xander hadn’t put into his hands. He watched a few television shows by his own choice when Xander was making telephone calls.

And at one point, Spike disappeared to take a nap. That fit in with his habits of the past week or so, but Xander discovered Spike had put a new spin on the custom when he ducked into his room to get his address book. He started when he saw a shock of blond hair peeking out beneath a pile of covers. He stood still for a moment clutching the book he’d come to retrieve, but no matter how long he stood there he still didn’t know quite what to make of it. So he left the room quietly, shutting the door almost all the way, and tried not to wonder what that meant for tonight’s sleeping arrangements.

He was tempted to call Willow, let her know that some sort of breakthrough, minor as it was, had happened. But then he’d have to explain the bed-sharing part, and he didn’t feel ready to turn that one over to anyone’s questions. Besides, nothing so very earth-shattering had happened. Had it?

Then that night when Xander took up position on the couch and switched on the DVD player, Spike came and -- there really was no other word for it -- curled up next to Xander, feet tucked behind him, head hovering on a tilt a few inches away from Xander’s shoulder.

The movie was halfway through when Spike let his hand rest lightly on Xander’s thigh.

After that -- well, Xander was used to manhandling different people into snuggle pose -- Anya, Willow, Buffy, even Nigel when he’d been relaxed enough and not checking his cell phone for calls from the office. So it wasn’t long before he had pulled Spike against his side. Spike’s cheek fit naturally against the area just below his collarbone, Spike’s arm slipped around Xander’s waist, and Xander curved an arm around shoulders and a frame and lightness that weren’t so different from any of the people he’d held in this position before.


	8. Temporary

So they had slept together for a few nights after the first time Spike joined Xander in his bed.

Well, not slept _together_ , slept together. Slept in the same space. Shared a bed while sleeping. Cohabitated nocturnally. Sometimes it was Spike coming into his bed in the middle of the night; other times both of them just went straight to Xander’s room after they finished watching a movie. In any case, they were now snoozing on the same mattress nightly.

“Okay. Fine. It’s sleeping together, is what it is,” Xander told the individual pots of chocolate crèmes at Marks & Spencer Foods. “I’m not going to sugar-coat it.”

Someone cleared her throat and he jumped where he stood. A woman reached around him to get what she wanted and then skedaddled out of Desserts, so he pushed off for another department.

“It’s just comfort,” Xander muttered at the packets of pre-made sandwiches. He grabbed a curried chicken salad sandwich and frowned at the list of ingredients. “It doesn’t mean -- he’s just skittish. It’s not a regular thing just because it’s happened a few times, so no need to freak out. It’s just temporary.”

“Sounds like he’s waiting for you to make the move,” a man behind him said. “Now, if _you_ could move just a bit to the right . . .”

“Sorry,” Xander said hastily. After he got out of the man’s way, he looked down at his empty shopping cart for a moment before abandoning it.

He walked so quickly to the front of the store that he was stopped by security for a few minutes before they figured out that he hadn’t stolen anything.

“Things have to change,” he told himself on the way home. “No more of this -- no more. It’s confusing, and it’s weird, and he doesn’t even know who he is, much less who I am. I’m supposed to watch him, not get him more messed up.”

Finally he was at the apartment door, unlocking it and entering the flat with a firm resolve. “I’m back,” he announced.

“Do you hear that, Spike? It’s Xander,” he heard Andrew telling Spike in the other room. “Xannn-derrrr.”

When he reached the kitchen he found them sitting at the table with cups of tea and a plate of biscuits.

“What’s with the name-calling?” Xander asked.

“Oh!” Andrew straightened where he sat. “I was thinking, he hears you talking to people on the phone and saying their names, or talking to me, but you haven’t told him what he should call you. So I’m helping out.”

“Probably a good idea. I don’t want to be known as ‘that no-name guy with the endless supply of blood’.” Xander grabbed a bottle of water from the refrigerator and joined them at the table. “You know, I don’t remember Spike ever being so much with the tea-drinking,” he pointed out. “That’s not going to jog his memory.”

“You’re right,” Andrew answered with a sage nod. “I kind of just wanted some tea.”

Xander blinked and then laughed. “Right. No problemo. I’ve just been, I don’t know, a little --”

“Spike-focused?” Andrew suggested.

“Yeah.” They smiled at each other and Xander took a swallow of water.

“Well, I think it’s good you’ve let me take on some Spike watching these past couple of days. It’s given you some time.”

“Yeah, that’s . . . yeah.” He looked at his hands and tried not to think about how he had been out of the apartment as much as possible during the daytime recently. “How’s that going? You get any further on the history of worthy demons and their never-ending saga battling the unclean forces of good?”

“I’m switching back and forth now,” Andrew told him. “A little bit about the major demonic eras, some alternate reality education, and of course the history of the Scooby Clan.”

“Scooby Gang,” Xander said automatically. “And what? Why?”

Andrew smoothed the lapels of his tweed blazer. “Well, you figure Spike spent his last couple of years hanging with and obsessing about you guys. I thought --”

“About Buffy,” Xander corrected him. “Spike thought about Buffy.”

Andrew hesitated. “Well, yeah, but you were all there too.”

“That’s what they’ll say in the history books,” Xander observed with a rueful sigh. “ ‘They were all there too.’ ”

“I should get going,” Andrew said.

“You’re kidding. Really? No hanging out tonight?” Xander gave him a friendly punch, and tried not to notice when Andrew cringed and held his arm. “We have a bunch of great movies we can watch.”

“I sort of made plans,” Andrew explained. His cheeks burned.

“Oh, right. Well, don’t let me stop you on your night of fun,” Xander said, waving him out.

After saying their good-byes, and making arrangements to speak the next day, Andrew left and Xander was again alone with Spike. Spike. Who lately was sleeping in Xander’s bed. And they so needed to have the conversation about how that was no longer going to happen.

“So. Andrew’s been filling you in on the good old days in Sunnydale?” Xander asked. He got up to toss the water bottle, and cleared away the teacups and saucers, cursing himself for not getting right to the point. Okay, he could warm up to it, but the sooner their talk happened, the better.

When he turned back, Spike was regarding him with a half-smile.

Xander coughed. “You know to take everything Andrew says with a grain of salt the size of Detroit, right?”

Spike quirked an eyebrow at him.

“Not that Andrew isn’t a great guy. ‘Cause he is. He’s just a little prone to exaggeration. So what you hear from him, it’s . . . kind of a version of the truth, but just don’t take it as gospel. What he tells you about the Council, or you know, the slayers. Or me.”

Spike nodded slowly, but his eyes flicked down and then back up Xander’s body.

“Oh boy,” Xander breathed out as he re-took his seat at the table. “What the hell has he been saying?”

And Spike met his eyes and smiled. Not just a smile, but a wouldn’t-you-like-to-know grin.

Xander groaned. “Great. Just great. No way for me to figure out the crazy he’s been spreading.”

Spike looked upward, and after a moment Xander did too, as though there were some kind of code etched on the ceiling that would answer all of these questions.

But then Spike fixed his gaze on Xander once again, and that expression -- that impatient, frustrated, so very Spike expression that flitted across his face, made Xander feel as though it were years ago and Spike was regarding him incredulously after he’d just offered a particularly lousy solution to a demon problem.

It was creepy as hell. It was also oddly comforting.

“Just about had it with me, huh?” Xander asked. Spike seemed startled but then smiled shyly. Okay, back to the demure and retiring act. But no, because then Spike’s long, elegant fingers were gesturing, tracing a pattern in the air, and the shy Spike of only two weeks ago would never have tried anything like that. This was direct, this was new this was . . .

Xander’s eye followed the motions for a moment, widening as he realized just what Spike was miming.

“Man oh man,” he said finally. “We’re all a bunch of idiots.” He sighed and stood, walking over to the desk. It took a few minutes of rummaging around before he produced a pad of paper and a pen that worked.

“Can we just pretend that this wouldn’t have worked, oh, two weeks ago?” Xander asked as he handed the writing materials to Spike.

Spike grinned at him again before he turned his attention to the pen. He tightened his left hand around it as though trying to remember how to perform this task by touch.

“Hey,” Xander said. No reaction.

“Hey,” he repeated more urgently. Spike looked up. “Don’t -- don’t bother writing out what Andrew told you tonight. Tell me what happ -- write what you remember. About you.”

Spike didn’t react much to that; he just gripped the pen and studied at the paper in front of him. After a few moments, his hand began to tremble. He touched the tip to the paper and then closed his eyes, letting the pen fall to the table with a clatter.

“Okay,” Xander said quietly. He rested his hand lightly over Spike’s, and some of the shaking stopped. When he shifted as if to move his hand away Spike gave him an imploring look. “Okay, no problem. Not going anywhere. Whenever you’re ready.”

Spike blinked and then looked down at the paper once more. More than a minute passed while he thought and trembled and Xander held on as gently as he could.

Then at last Spike lifted his hand carefully, as though he didn’t want to dislodge Xander’s touch, and took up the pen again. With evident effort he moved the nib of the pen down and up, scratches of circles and lines emerging only gradually. Xander didn’t draw back his hand, but he looked away. It seemed too private to watch somehow.

Finally Spike laid down the pen and turned the paper towards Xander. Though the letters were shaky and the mark of the ink was faint, the one word he’d managed was clear enough.

Xander swallowed. “Pain,” he read aloud.

Spike traced the letters with his fingertips and then touched Xander’s arm. His eyes were too bright as he nodded.

“Now?” Xander asked in a low voice.

Spike tiled his head to the side for a moment, but then shook it.

“So not now. But . . . before?”

Spike waved his hand in the air as though he was drawing currents through his fingers. Back, back.

“Way before,” Xander clarified. “First . . . that’s the first thing you remember. Pain.”

Spike nodded once more. Though he looked distressed, he also appeared exhausted.

When Xander stood, Spike seemed surprised, clutching the pad of paper as though intent on making a second attempt at eking out some sort of communication. But when Xander gently disengaged it from his fingers and tugged at them lightly, Spike stood with him and followed him into the bedroom.

For a moment he shifted uncertainly from foot to foot while Xander pulled down the covers. But as soon as Xander lay down and stretched out his arm, Spike immediately crawled up the mattress, settling his head against Xander’s chest.

“Spike,” Xander said, and suddenly Spike was holding on to Xander tightly, his thin frame wracked with silent heaving sobs. “Oh fuck, Spike,” Xander whispered. “Sorry. I’m so sorry.”


	9. Temporary

“What do you mean, you and Spike are taking a day off?” Andrew asked in confusion.

When Andrew called the next day, Xander told him in as brief an account as possible about the one-word message Spike had managed to scratch out. It took a while for the excited noises coming from Andrew’s end to begin to form words.

“Just what I said.” Xander poured himself another cup of coffee and added milk. “A day off.”

“You can’t -- he just -- Xander, you made some huge progress. Like, Anakin returning to the true side of The Force huge. Get Spike to write more, ask more questions, keep the pressure going. Now that he’s started, maybe we’ll be able to get him on a roll and figure out what’s going on inside his head. If we learn his dark secrets, I could write up a ground-breaking account _cum_ personal memoir for the Council about my time investigating the trials and tribulations of William the Bloody.”

There was a full-stop while Andrew took a shaky breath. “Oh, and Spike could write something too, if he wanted.”

“Yeah, I’d love to see what he’d write about Angel,” Xander observed.

“See? It’s all for the greater knowledge for ages to come! Don’t rest on your laurels now. You’re like his connection to living in the world, and _of_ the world, Xander.”

“What I am . . . is tired of being stressed out about all of this,” Xander said after a beat. “About how I’m supposed to be acting, about what any one thing that’s happening means. We need a break from all the figuring out and monitoring and pushing.”

“Memoir,” Andrew said desperately.

“I’m thinking it’ll keep,” Xander said. “That little bit from yesterday damn near laid him out.” He closed his eye as he remembered the way Spike had shaken in his arms, the way time and again he had fallen asleep only to jerk awake, evidently in the middle of one nightmare after another. “I’m not pushing, not until he wants to try it again. And definitely not until he stops wearing a rut in the floor with all the pacing he’s been doing.”

Andrew sighed on the other end, and Xander could hear him tap-tapping his fingers through the receiver. “How come you’re so sure he doesn’t want to try again? Maybe he won’t want a day off.”

Xander glanced over at Spike as he appeared in the doorway for a moment while he continued to stalk back and forth. “Point. Okay, so maybe not a day off exactly. Tell you what. You got anyone looking for a fight?”

***

They arrived at Slayer Central in the designated unmarked van to find Lydia and a handful of teenage girls waiting for them in one of the work-out spaces.

“These ones, mostly trained,” Lydia informed them in her usual, genial shout as some of the girls looked Spike and Xander over while others turned away and giggled. “But with very few real vampires. So we give them this chance, fight Spike.”

“They might want to go easy on him at first,” Xander said to her in a low voice. “You know, let him warm up. Besides that night in the cemetery, Spike hasn’t really done the whole fighting thing.”

She snorted. “I see him that night, when he killed that other vampire. He have to go easy on _them_. So embarrassing for them when he takes them all down right away.” She jerked her head towards the girls, most of who blushed on cue.

“Okay!” Andrew walked in, rubbing his hands together. “Everybody is kung-fu fighting?”

The girls murmured and shuffled around into something resembling a queue in front of the floor mats.

“Hey, wait.” Xander pulled Lydia aside. “That night, you said you thought he wouldn’t kill any vampires, except the ones that, uh, tried to attack me. So I’m not sure where you’re getting the idea that he’s completely fight-ready. I don’t want you all working him over.”

She laughed. “That night he only fight that _vampire_. These, these are slayers.”

He blinked. “Um. Okay.” At her impatient gesturing he retreated, but he kept close and in view in case Spike needed him.

At first the other girls hung back, observing while Spike started off circling and trading blows with Lydia. Spike kept glancing Xander’s way, seemingly holding back and dancing just out of reach on the defensive. After a little while, Xander’s neck just kept getting tighter and tenser, especially when the two girls after Lydia seemed wary and stiff in their fighting stances.

Then the third girl to spar with Spike tried out a roundhouse kick. When she connected Spike started back, but then came at her again with a grin on his face. Soon after, a slayer from Texas who had years of martial arts training before she’d been activated came to take her turn. Spike watched her moves with clear admiration before suddenly lunging forward and taking her on. The buzz in the room was palpable: the others all gathered around to watch, and when her strikes connected to Spike’s blows, they seemed to spark in the air.

“He’s _very_ good fighter,” Lydia yelled into Xander’s ear as the group of girls still waiting to fight dwindled. “You maybe worry too much.”

“Thanks. Or something,” he yelled back. “Anyway, thanks for helping out,” he continued in a more normal voice.

“I like to fight,” she announced.

“Yeah, I got that vibe from you,” he said with a grin.

“You both come dancing with me soon,” she advised with a brisk nod. “No excuses.”

“We’ll see,” Xander murmured, his gaze drawn back to the work-out mats. Spike had just finished nodding at the last Slayer, and now he eased out of his fighting stance in a fluid move and headed straight towards Xander.

* * *

The next morning, Xander was on his feet and stumbling towards the phone before he’d even processed the fact that someone was calling. He’d moved the receiver out of the bedroom a couple of days before, when Spike staying in his bed with him at night and napping in it during the day had become a regular thing. There didn’t seem any point in bothering him with the buzz.

On the walk back from the training session, Spike had seemed exhausted, but nothing like the night before that, when he’d was obviously drained and had fairly radiated despair. No, after going some rounds with the Slayers, he was bounding along, shadow-boxing, exultant. Lucky for them they had taken a route lined with pubs. Bystanders seemed to assume they were in their cups, either ignoring them or watching with amusement as Spike vibrated down the street.

After getting inside, they’d crawled into bed, Spike worn out from the fighting, Xander feeling the rush of tiredness that came from watching someone fight hard.

Now the apartment was suffused with the indirect haze of light behind the thick curtains, and Xander woke up just a bit more as he realized that he hadn’t any thoughts of drawing back those curtains for days.

Meanwhile, the phone continued to buzz.

“Yeah,” he answered in a hoarse voice. He put his hand against the wall to keep himself from swaying.

“Xander.”

“Giles?”

“Yes. Good morning. I’m sorry I haven’t had a chance to speak to you while I’ve been out of town, but with these recent developments, I thought it would be a good idea to check in with you.”

Xander rubbed his forehead and realized he’d left his eye-patch on the nightstand. “Um. You know I’m not the one hooked in to the news from Central. Andrew could probably tell you what’s up with . . . whatever it is.”

“I meant the latest developments with Spike,” Giles corrected him.

“So then you’ve already talked to Andrew.”

“At some length. He told me about your excursion yesterday, as well as Spike’s effort to communicate.”

“Okay. Then you pretty much know everything.”

There was a pause. “Xander, I’m offering to help.”

Xander put his back to the wall and slid down until he was sitting on the floor. “No, I hear you. Sorry.”

“I’m sure it must be rather trying, this circumstance with Spike. And I just wanted to remind you that you have . . . resources.”

Xander cleared his throat. “Yeah, okay. I don’t think I need to go to a shrink, if that’s what you’re saying.”

“Xander--”

“Why isn’t he talking?” Xander asked suddenly. “Do you think he can’t?”

“It could be a hysterical reaction,” Giles said after a beat. “At times of great trauma, people have been known to stop speaking.”

“Just refuse to say anything?” Xander asked. He switched the receiver to his other ear.

“No, not exactly. More that they cannot speak, just as much as if they had truly lost that ability.”

“Great trauma,” Xander repeated. “And okay, people have reacted that way, but aren’t we talking a whole different ballgame for vampires? What’s going to wig out a vampire so much that he won’t talk any more?”

Giles sighed. “It’s a good question. My best guess is that it must have been something devastating. But given the great effort it seems to have taken for Spike to write only one word, I don’t know how soon we’ll learn more.”

“Okay.” Xander lowered his voice. “Is it just me, or can you hear the swishing sound signaling me being officially in over my head too?”

“Xander, if you feel somehow this is too great of a burden, all you need do is tell me, or tell Andrew, and we can arrange for something to be done with Spike.”

“No,” Xander said loudly. “No, I mean . . . that’s okay,” he said in a more even tone. “It’s not a burden. Just I wish I knew how to help more.”

“Well. Andrew has told me a great deal about the time you’ve spent with Spike.”

“Oh boy, here we go,” Xander muttered.

“From what Andrew has said, I’ve the sense that you are helping Spike more than you know.”

“That’s . . . reassuring,” Xander replied. He glanced towards his bedroom door. He knew on the other side Spike was sleeping under the covers, on Xander’s pillow and on Xander’s side of the bed.

“And of course you’ve become invested in helping him more. Still. I don’t think there would be any major setbacks if you chose to spend some time away from him, or travel elsewhere. You can have whatever funds you need.”

“No, we’re fine here,” Xander said absently.

The door to the bedroom opened and Spike padded out, coming to stand beside Xander while he blinked himself fully awake. He yawned, and then crouched down, reaching out to stroke his finger tips along Xander’s arm.

“Hey,” Xander greeted him softly.

“Ah,” Giles said from the receiver. Xander jerked himself back to attention to the phone call. “Then is that --”

“Spike just woke up. He’s pretty much keeping my hours.”

“I see,” Giles said. His voice sounded more distant and tinny, as though he had readjusted his hold on the phone.

Spike cocked his head to the side, watching Xander. Then he rose, wandering off into the kitchen.

Xander heard Giles take a breath, and he rushed to speak first. “Anyway. Thanks for everything. I appreciate it.”

“Xander--”

“Go have your vacation,” Xander interrupted him. “What, you haven’t forgotten how to get your fun on, have you?”

Giles made a noise that sounded almost like a snort. “Do call me if I can help in any way. Even if it’s just for a listening ear.”

“Yeah, all right.”

They hung up, and Xander approached the table where his laptop rested, clicking on his email to check it.

Messages from Willow, Buffy, and Giles, all of them new since last night. Looked like Andrew had really made the rounds.


	10. Temporary

“If we could all just sit down and talk about this, I think we could really help. And then maybe figure out who’s responsible for what happened. And then I could beat them up.”

“Buff, I get that you wish we could all have a sit-down about this. But with all of you out of town, it’s just not going to happen for a while. Things will be okay until you get back; you don’t have to worry. Plenty of time for cracking skulls later.”

Xander rubbed at his jaw. His shoulder was starting to ache too, from the time he’d spent cradling the receiver against it. He'd talked to Giles yesterday morning, and had Willow phone that night, with calls from Andrew getting more frequent as on-the-hour weather reports. Everyone wanted to talk about Spike, about the fighting, about the writing, about the whole situation, and Xander was starting to get cross-eyed and hoarse-voiced from going over the entire situation too many times.

“I know. But now that’s not going to be for another few more weeks, and meanwhile I'm stuck listening to updates and feeling bad that you’re doing so much.”

“I’m not really doing _that_ much,” Xander said.

“Yes, you are,” she answered. “You must be. That’s major, that Spike managed to remember something, even though. . . ”

“Even though he still doesn’t remember us. Or himself,” Xander supplied.

“Yeah. I guess it was the entire time that he felt it, at least since he’s been dead. I mean, since he’s been missing. The pain . . .” Her sentence trailed off, and for a moment she was silent.

He waited, listening to her light breathing. “You okay?” he asked finally.

“Me? Yeah. Of course.”

“You don’t sound so okay. Buffy, I know that you and Spike were . . ." He thought for a moment. "Well, I’m not sure what you were, at the end of things.”

“I’m not sure either,” she said. “After Spike came back, everything was so urgent. With so much world-saving stuff, there wasn't much time to figure out what was happening between us. And now, even if he started to remember who I am, so much has happened. Never mind how . . . how he’s suffered.”

This time they were both quiet.

“That’s the part I don’t get,” Xander said. “I mean, he helped save the world, right? What kind of sense does it make for him to go straight from conquering hero to getting hit with constant pain? Not that I get the way prizes are handed out for these kinds of things, but to me this seems like a cheat.”

“It’s so not fair,” she agreed.

He smiled despite himself. “You know, you’re starting to sound a little like Dawn?”

“You would too if you'd been listening to her talk about translations for a week and a half," she pointed out. She sighed. “I still wish I could do something.”

Xander forced himself to exhale. Of course she wanted to take charge. She wouldn't be Buffy if she didn't. But somehow even in the middle of Andrew's prying and worrying, Willow's too-careful sympathy and odd advice, and Giles's knowing-silences, Buffy was the one making him the most jittery. "Buffy, relax. When there’s something to be done for Spike, you’ll do it.”

“Xander, not just for Spike,” she said. “For you. I’m worried about you.”

“Hey, I’m fine.”

“You’re fine,” she repeated skeptically. “Xander, I know I’m not there, but I'm not exactly missing the vibe that what’s happening right now is big for you.”

He leaned forward, as though he was going to say something in response. But since he wasn’t sure what would come out of his mouth if he tried, he kept quiet.

“Oh, I know!" she burst out. "We could all talk on the phone!”

“And we’re not talking now?” Xander asked pointedly. “You, Giles, Willow -- and I tell you, I am this close to making Andrew take my number off his speed dial. I mean, I’m glad you guys want to know what’s up, but enough with the phone talking.”

He didn’t tell her that Spike had apparently had enough with the phone talking, too. Part of it seemed like the noise; Spike would start ever so slightly if he was near when the phone rang, sometimes edging closer to Xander with a suspicious expression, sometimes disappearing into his room for hours even after Xander had hung up.

Part of it was definitely the amount of time Xander was spending on the phone. It wasn’t just the Scoobies that checked in: Lydia called to try to convince Xander that it was finally club night; Andrew’s assistant called several times to tell Xander that Andrew _would_ call; and even Nigel left an odd, vague message, something about hoping Xander was doing well. Xander had gone up to the answering machine while it was recording, his hand hovering in the air as he listened to the familiar lilt of Nigel’s voice. Xander hadn’t answered that one, though he hadn’t exactly erased it from the machine either.

Now whenever the phone rang, Spike shot it a look that seemed to say _Not again_. And during one of Andrew’s calls, Spike had come to stand close to Xander, shoulder just barely brushing Xander’s chest while he listened. As Andrew kept on talking, Spike rolled his eyes in recognition and then disengaged the receiver from Xander’s hand before hanging it up in its cradle.

After that, they’d gone to the pub and stayed for a good long while, enjoying the silence.

“No, no,” Buffy continued. “Not all the individual talks you’ve been having with each of us. I mean together. Like a conference call. Well, not just like one, but one of those specifically.”

Xander blinked. “Conference call?”

“That way you don’t have to hear from everyone over and over, and all of us don’t have to call each other after to -- not that we’re doing that!”

Xander held the receiver at arm’s length and looked at it. They were all calling each other?

“I’ll have Andrew set one up,” Buffy went on, her voice small from the receiver’s distance. “Tomorrow, okay? We can all weigh in, talk things through, and maybe come up with plans and solutions. Like old times.”

Xander returned the phone to his ear, holding onto it with both hands. “Old times usually meant we were all in the same place.” He paused. “And that there would be donuts.”

“This is really close to that,” Buffy assured him. “Okay, maybe no donuts, but there could be location-appropriate snacks on everyone’s end.”

“Much as the prospect of eating a Lion bar while I hear your voice coming out of a speaker appeals to me, I’m just thinking us all talking isn’t going to turn up that much,” Xander said.

“But you figure, even though there’s been lots of Spike and you, and you and Spike, but there hasn’t been much of the rest of us in the mix. Maybe it’ll really help.”

“Great. So I can tell everyone the exact same stuff over again?” He stopped himself and took a breath. “Look, if you want to do it, I’ll show, but put me on record as saying ‘what for?’”

“Will do,” Buffy said cheerfully. “And you’ll be okay until then?”

Xander resisted the urge to smack his head against something. “Of course I’ll be okay until then. I’ve been okay for weeks.”

“Right, no, I wasn’t saying . . . just be careful.”

“I’m being careful.”

“I heard about Spike taking on a group of the Slayers,” she added after a pause. “That was a great idea.”

“Yeah. Not that he hasn’t been getting better the whole time he’s been staying with me, even if you’re only counting how he’s looking at my face now instead of my feet. But the other night, the fighting . . . he seemed more Spike-like.”

“Tomorrow night, we’ll talk again. It’ll be a good thing; you’ll see.”

“Fine. We’ll be ready for whenever Andrew plans it.”

“Spike too?” she asked. Then she gave a nervous laugh. “I mean, of course, Spike too, just that with the not-talking . . .”

“He can listen. Who knows? Maybe hearing everyone together will spark something.”

He could hear Buffy swallow, as though she was making herself wait to speak. “Going to the training, that was good.”

“Yes, good; we covered that.”

“And I know Spike seemed like himself when you watched him spar.”

“But?”

“But . . . definitely don’t go out patrolling without one of the slayers. Not until we’re sure he’s . . . totally safe.”

“I hear you,” Xander answered. “Totally safe.”


	11. Temporary

“Sure, Buffy said not to go out patrolling without one of the slayers. But this isn’t patrolling,” Xander muttered to himself as he pulled the door to and squared his shoulders.

There had been another phone conversation with Andrew to confirm that they were on for the conference call the next night. Xander had repeated once again that he and Spike were completely fine. Though Andrew fretted for a while that he should probably come over to check on them, he also hinted that he had his own plans, which Xander nearly fell over himself to encourage.

The feeling of being under a virtual microscope had been getting stronger with every phone call and email he got. By nightfall he was beyond feeling itchy and antsy. Even turning his phone off and shutting down the computer didn’t seem to help.

“So not patrolling,” he repeated. “This is Spike and me, going out for a walk. In a cemetery. In a neighborhood where a couple of people have gone missing lately.”

Spike raised his eyebrows at this, and then patted his coat pockets absently as he stood on the sidewalk.

“What? What are you looking for?”

Spike’s hand remained on top of his pockets. He had a puzzled look on his face.

“Something, huh? But you don’t know?”

After stealing a glance at Xander, Spike gave an almost imperceptible shrug.

“You know, it’s the little things that test a person’s commitment to a memory recovery project,” Xander told him. “Like, do I really want to get you a lighter and cigarettes to nudge you back towards that whole badass yet cancer-spreading persona? Or do I take the side of my lungs and happily ignore the fact that somewhere deep inside of you you’re probably dying for a smoke?”

Spike tilted his head back as he watched Xander, but otherwise didn’t appear to weigh in on the topic of nicotine availability and secondhand smoke.

“Yeah, okay,” Xander grumbled.

And so he detoured to make a pit stop at a pub where he could buy Spike Dunhills.

By the time they left (Spike had stepped up to the counter, probably out of habit, so they’d had a pint), Spike had figured out how to work the lighter.

When they reached the cemetery gates, Spike had gotten a cigarette lit and was drawing on it with practiced ease. And it was Xander who had to look away from Spike’s gaze, as the graceful, repeated arc of glowing ember to Spike’s mouth brought back memories of a thousand and one patrols in Sunnydale.

* * *

“Okay, okay, you’re okay,” Xander said under his breath as he attempted to keep Spike’s arm slung over his shoulder and open the door to the flat at the same time.

It had started out as a slow night, just the two of them, the London fog, and row after row of tombstones.

But then out of nowhere some kind of demon had rushed them both. The claw-having, horn-sporting, really unfriendly kind of demon.

Spike had stepped in between Xander and him with a low growl, and Xander was knocked onto his back when the scuffle began. He gasped and tried to catch his breath as the sounds of fighting reached him from a few feet away. He’d just climbed to his feet when he heard the demon hiss and howl behind him. Then there was silence.

When Xander turned, Spike was walking towards him with a grimace on his face and his hand clutching his wounded side.

“Right, sit there,” Xander instructed Spike, getting him set up on the edge of the bathtub. He clacked bottles and boxes around in the cabinets until he located his first-aid kit, not so much because he couldn’t find it, but because otherwise it was so quiet with Spike just watching and waiting (and of course not breathing) behind him. The last sound he’d heard Spike make was back at the gravesite, that snickering, menacing growl.

“Probably want to get your clothes off,” Xander muttered as he washed his hands quickly. When he heard Spike get to his feet, he quickly amended the instructions. “I mean . . . most of them: the coat, the jeans, the shirts. Leave your boxers on.” While he dried his hands, he said a quick prayer that Spike had actually remembered to wear the boxers from the stack that Xander had stashed in the guest bedroom.

“Okay then,” he said aloud as he got to his knees in front of Spike. Lucky for him, the boxers were on.

When he looked up at Spike, he found himself being watched with a keen gaze. “You ready for this?” he asked. Spike nodded.

He pressed a wet washcloth against Spike’s side, cleaning the area as best as he could. Spike didn’t move at first, though he did shift a little when Xander took the bloody cloth away and replaced it with a clean one that was just damp.

“Worth putting some medicine on it, you think?” Xander asked. He noted absently that Spike had lifted his hand to rest on Xander’s head at some point. “Maybe not. I’ve never heard of you guys, vampire guys, getting infected or anything. So we’ll just hang out another few before the quick-time healing helps stop the flow.” He kept his head down, his eye on the covered claw mark as he tried to keep the pressure steady.

“I think we’re almost okay,” he announced a little while later after peeking and seeing that the bleeding had slowed considerably. “Then we can get you some blood, get you into bed.” He flattened his hand against the cloth again, keeping it firmly against Spike’s side.

That was when he noticed that Spike’s hand was combing through his hair. It must have started out slowly, while he’d been focused on the wound. But there was no denying it was happening now, what with the curious rakes of Spike’s fingers, threading through and smoothing Xander’s hair. When Xander let himself look lower, away from the now pinkish facecloth, he saw that Spike was hard. Hard through his cotton boxers, just a few inches away from Xander’s face where he had frozen on the floor, and . . . oh fuck, Xander could feel himself getting hard in response.

And it seemed kind of clear that Spike got that too. Before he had been stroking through Xander’s hair, petting. Now he was caressing, drawing his fingers through slowly, purposefully, even if there was a small hint of hesitation.

“Um . . . ” Xander tried softly. He stayed in place, not wanting to pull away suddenly and disarm Spike, not wanting to remain there too long or get any closer, because in the long list of world’s worst ideas, this had to come up somewhere in the top ten. Spike, him, and . . . oh fuck, Spike’s thumb was moving slowly across the nape of Xander’s neck.

“Think it’s . . . probably you’re okay now,” Xander said hoarsely, pulling away the cloth for the last time and finding that Spike had definitely stopped bleeding.

And now would be the time to pull himself away, right? Stand up, hustle Spike into the kitchen, get them both to bed, and try to think about something else.

But oh god, he was such a sucker for this kind of thing, not that he’d ever had this kind of thing exactly, the comfort and the calculation all wrapped up into one non-speaking tight-bodied package of sharp cheekbones and wavy dark blond hair. He tried to get his breathing steady. Any moment now. Any moment. He’d stand and try a smile and stop whatever this was from happening.

But when Spike slipped a hand down the neck of Xander’s t-shirt, rubbing at the tense muscles along Xander’s shoulders, Xander sighed and put his head into Spike’s lap.

Stroke pet stroke, Spike’s fingers ghosting over sensitive spots, rubbing harder at tense ones, and how the hell did he already know the difference between the two? Xander telling himself, okay, really time to move now.

He groaned when he brought his arms up and around Spike’s waist. He burrowed his head in Spike’s lap, and yeah, okay, obviously bringing his cheek against an erection that felt surprisingly warm despite the cool touch of the rest of Spike’s skin. Borrowed blood, Xander guessed, and that alone should have made him pull away quickly. Instead he adjusted a little until his lips were just barely mouthing the head of Spike’s cock.

The hand caressing his back fluttered, seemingly unsure, but then moved back to his head, tugging slightly on locks of hair in a way that seemed to emphasize that yes, this was very much welcome attention, and oh yeah, that, do that part again.

The thin cotton was damp from the moisture of Xander’s mouth, damp from pre-come, and Xander decided that he wasn’t even going to pretend this wasn’t happening anymore and tightened his arms around Spike’s waist, pulling Spike forward and letting himself get an easier path of access to mouth along the hard length of Spike’s cock. “Fuck,” he murmured against the fabric, and a shiver worked its way through Spike’s body.

They barely moved, but for the next few minutes it felt to Xander like a rush of actions and reactions. Spike continued to comb, tug, and caress Xander’s hair; Xander kept on sliding his mouth up and down, tongue flicking out to rasp along the fabric and taste the dampness there.

Then there was a kind of a click of Spike’s jaw, a hard swallowing sound, and Xander looked up to find bright blue eyes flickering gold.

“Jesus,” Xander intoned. “The . . . oh fuck, Spike, what the hell am I --” Before he thought about it, he was scrambling to his feet, backing away and slamming the middle of his back against the towel rack. He winced and arched his back away from it, in the process thunking his head on the bathroom wall.

Spike stayed where he was, but the ridges that had started to get pronounced on his forehead and face receded. He swallowed, obviously watching Xander for a signal.

“Sorry, I’m sorry,” Xander said. He put his hand to the back of his head and took a shaky breath. “You don’t even -- I can’t -- it’s not right, and I can’t believe I let it go that far.” He started to reach a hand out as though to cup Spike’s jaw, then snatched it back when his mind caught up to what his body was trying.

Spike narrowed his eyes at him, and Xander let out a small, hysterical laugh. “Funny, huh? Buffy wanted to make sure I was safe from you. She should have been worrying the other way around.”

He made himself walk out of the room slowly. When he reached the door of his bedroom, he stopped. “I’m sorry. I didn’t --” Another beat, and he pushed the door open. “Make sure to have a couple of bags of blood before you go to bed, all right?”

Then he closed his door, and locked it.


	12. Temporary

When Xander’s alarm went off, he hit the off button instead of the snooze.

At least, he was pretty sure that was what had happened, since by the time he came to it was already two in the afternoon. He groaned and fell back on the mattress, wriggling his toes and trying to will himself fully awake.

It took him a few moments to figure out why he was in bed alone. Then as he raised himself up on his elbows and stared at the closed door, he remembered.

He showered and got dressed in the ensuite bathroom, taking way more time than he needed. Sure, it was only putting off the inevitable but he couldn’t help but stall a little. As he did his customary last check of the eye-patch in the mirror, he gave himself a firm nod. Right. He was ready. Then he groaned and rubbed his hands over his face.

He’d wanted it. Wanted Spike. Had probably for a lot longer than last night, though the signals had been too tangled to get through to him, especially because he’d been hanging out with Spike nearly 24-7. And Spike, at least in that moment last night, had wanted him back.

But even if Spike seemed to be up for any of the stuff they had been moments away from launching into, Xander couldn’t let anything happen between them. Correction: he couldn’t allow anything _more_ to happen between them.

He faltered as he smoothed the strap and then tucked a piece of hair behind his ear. The Spike he’d known wouldn’t have wanted anything like this with him. And no matter how many little glimpses Xander caught of the old Spike lately in a gesture or expression, the vampire he’d known wasn’t around anymore.

At least, not yet he wasn’t.

“He’d probably hire someone to off me if he was memory-having when I tried that,” Xander told his reflection. “Oh no, wait. No chip. He’d kill me himself.”

He went back into the bedroom and sat on the bed. “Okay. Okay. I can do this. Just go out and explain that I shouldn’t have done anything, that none of it’s _wrong_ wrong, but it’s wrong with me and him right now, mainly because he has no clue who I am or who he is or what any of this might mean, and I’d be taking advantage of him, except for how, oh god, I kind of already _did_.”

Finally he forced himself to his feet and walked out. Except Spike wasn’t in the kitchen. When he checked, there was no Spike to be found in the other bathroom. And to keep the trend going, Spike wasn’t anywhere in the living room.

Just as Xander lifted a shaky hand to the door to the hallway, his heart pounding, because what if Spike had just _bolted_ last night, and who knew where he might have gotten to . . . Spike opened the door of the guest bedroom.

Any part of the speech Xander had been hoping would reach his lips died as he turned around.

Spike walked towards him and then stopped about four feet away. He shoved his hands into his coat pockets in what looked like an attempt at a casual gesture.

“Hey,” Xander said.

Spike gave him a nod, though he was gazing at some point on the wall behind Xander’s head rather than looking at Xander himself. He looked more pale than usual, and tired, as though he hadn’t slept.

“Listen . . .” Xander began. He stopped and shook his head. “Okay, so that wasn’t the best start. It’s not like you’ve got other options in that department, right?”

Spike’s eyes flickered to him, then away again.

“I shouldn’t have done what I did last night,” Xander continued. “I just . . . I got carried away, and . . .”

Spike shifted his focus to the corner of the room, and huffed out a breath.

“And this probably doesn’t make any kind of sense to you,” Xander concluded. He sat down on the couch and let his face fall into his hands. “Just. I’m sorry.”

A beat or two passed. Then Spike was sitting next to him, touching him on his shoulder, hesitant at first, more firmly when Xander didn’t make a move to shrug him off.

“How wrong is that, you trying to make me feel better,” Xander muttered. He lifted his hand to place it over Spike’s. Neither of them moved for a long while.

* * *

“So this should be relatively quick and painless,” Xander promised Spike as they walked down the empty hall to the meeting room.

The rest of the afternoon and evening had been passed in an uncomfortable haze. They watched a movie that Xander put in, not sitting as close as they usually did, but not exactly on opposite ends of the sofa either. When Xander made himself an early dinner, Spike came in and sipped his blood from a mug, his eyes somehow seeming to follow Xander the entire time yet never actually on him when Xander looked back.

Xander had started and then stopped himself from saying dozens of times that they were just going to have to go back to the way things had been before. Because every time the idea started to coalesce in his head, he realized there was no way things had been. Everything had been changing, slowly but surely, the entire time.

“Buffy just wants to check in and get input from everyone who’s been around you,” he went on. “Andrew wanted to do it here, I guess because he’s been working late --”

“He really has,” said Nigel as they entered the room. “Xander, I can’t tell you how wonderful it is to see you.”

As Xander stopped in his tracks, Nigel came around the table and grasped Xander’s hand. “I hope you don’t mind that I’m to sit in on this conference. When Andrew told me about your work with the vampire, I thought, what a fantastic chance this would be, to observe and learn.” He looked down at his hand, still holding Xander’s, and let go with a laugh. “Of course, of the two of us, I have more training, so when I say _learn_ . . . well, you understand me.”

“Of course,” Xander echoed. He nodded absently at Nigel, more focused on watching as Spike hovered in the doorway before moving inside with a slow stalk.

“Not that you don’t -- well, you have such an intuitive approach,” Nigel finished. He gazed at Xander in an appraising manner. “And of course, you’ve a physicality that is quite unlike anything --”

Spike smoothly moved in between them, blocking Nigel’s view of Xander’s body. He cast a cursory glance Nigel’s way, and then turned to face Xander, an eyebrow quirked.

“Intriguing,” Nigel offered with a smile.

“Hey, Andy,” Xander said in relief as Andrew bustled in with his assistant in his wake.

“Xander. Spike. Nigel.” Andrew nodded to each of them in turn. He rushed to take the seat at the head of the table and bounced in the leather chair a few times before folding his hands and assuming a thoughtful air. “That will be all, Timothy,” he told his assistant.

They all waited while Timothy threw them resentful looks and left the room at a snail’s pace.

Andrew gestured to the other chairs. “Whenever you’re all ready.”

Xander took the seat to Andrew’s right, Spike sat on Xander’s other side, and Nigel stationed himself across the table.

Nigel was in full pro-mode, Xander noted: power tie, alert posture, ready to pounce on anyone or anything if it helped him out. He kept a keen eye on Xander.

“Still not sure why we couldn’t do this at our place,” Xander said. He slide his palms forward on the table, then back as he forced himself to relax in his chair. “Though maybe you figured the reunion would work better here?”

Andrew laughed and stroked his throat with a flutter of his hand. He very deliberately did not look in Nigel’s direction. “Oh, well, it’s just that we wanted representatives from the different branches of the Council since this is --”

“You start without me,” Lydia announced as she entered, swinging her bag.

“You’re late,” Andrew said in a clipped voice. Xander raised his eyebrows at the A-one Giles impersonation.

“I just get here,” Lydia said, as though this explained everything, and perhaps indicated that Andrew was the one who was late. “Xander, I get no workout today because Spike did not come.”

Xander grinned at her. “I’ll bet.”

She gave his chair a friendly bump with her hip. “Hi Spike,” she greeted with a wink. When he looked her up and down with a guarded expression, she laughed.

“How’s your DJ?” Xander asked as she took the seat to the left of Spike.

“New boots,” she indicated, swinging her feet onto the table to display them.

“Real snakeskin,” Xander said. “I’m impressed. You’ve got to be holding out on him still.”

She flipped her purple hair back. “You know I make him wait. He complain, but he love it.”

“You can tell those are snakeskin?” Andrew asked Xander.

“It’s not for nothing I’ve been shopping-trained by the greatest Slayer of them all,” Xander said with a small bow.

Spike cocked his head to the side and then reached out to stroke the boots.

“Nice, yeah?” Lydia asked him.

“I imagine we should get started,” Nigel said.

“So we should get started,” Andrew exclaimed as though Nigel hadn’t spoken. Spike looked at Andrew, and Andrew flushed. “We’ll just call Buffy first,” Andrew said, pulling the remote towards him and positioning the speaker.

“First?” Xander asked. “I thought since Willow and Giles couldn’t phone in, only Buffy--”

“Hi guys,” Buffy’s voice came through.

“Hey Buff,” Xander said.

“Ms. Summers,” Nigel said.

“I have new boots,” Lydia contributed.

“Is that Lydia? What style?” Buffy asked with interest.

“You’ve met Lydia?” Xander asked the speaker.

“If we could get started,” Andrew said in a strained voice.

“Okay, okay. I’m here and ready to talk. And listen,” Buffy added when Andrew cleared his throat. “Um, hi, Spike,” she added after a moment.

Spike looked at Xander, and then reached out to examine the speaker.

“No, no, leave it,” Andrew instructed with a wag of his finger.

Spike rolled his eyes, and Xander laughed.

“We just have one more -- and this is a little surprise! -- ah, here we go,” Andrew said, pressing some buttons after a series of beeps.

“Am I on?” a new voice asked.

A beat passed.

When Buffy spoke, her voice was shaky. “Angel?” she asked.


	13. Temporary

There was a pause. “Yeah.”

“Angel’s on this call?” Buffy asked more generally. There was an edge to her voice; Xander could see her face shutting down as though she were right in front of him.

“I thought Angel could provide some helpful guidance regarding the reintroduction of a souled vampire into human society,” Andrew explained.

“Uh huh. Hang on a sec.” It sounded from Buffy’s end like she was putting them all on mute.

“Oh boy,” Xander said to no one in particular.

“This is very bad idea,” Lydia remarked.

Andrew turned beet red.

“Yeah, okay. I guess not everyone was aware of who would be taking part,” Angel said.

“If it helps anyone, nobody told me that my former boyfriend would be at this confab,” Xander offered.

Nigel laughed. “But of course Xander and I parted amicably.”

“Of course,” Xander echoed again.

Angel sighed. The speaker made the noise sound tinny. “Look, Andrew, what did you want to accomplish here?”

Andrew started. “I--”

“Back,” Buffy said. Her voice seemed muffled. “Let’s hear about what’s been happening lately with Spike.”

“Fine,” Angel said. “I’m listening.”

Lydia and Andrew spoke in turn, explaining about their night of patrol with Xander and Spike, about Andrew’s interactions with Spike, and about Spike’s recent training visit to Slayer Central. After a while Xander tuned out, only contributing when it seemed like things needed elaboration or to get the conversation back on track.

Spike kept his eyes riveted on the speaker at first. Xander glanced at him every so often, especially when Angel or Buffy spoke, but there wasn’t any sign of recognition based on hearing either of them. Xander’s mind drifted for a moment as he considered what it would take to jog Spike’s memory, if it wasn’t the voice of a woman he’d been in love with, or the sound of the vampire he’d known for pretty much all of his unlife.

After a while, Spike obviously grew bored of the litany of questions and answers and leaned closer to Xander. After a short while, he reached under the table and laid his hand on Xander’s thigh, as though asking permission.

Xander hesitated. But there was obviously no way it wasn’t incredibly weird for Spike to hear everyone talking about him. Spike touching him this way, it wasn’t so very different from the stuff that had been standard between the two of them up until now, hanging out on the couch together with Spike’s head on his shoulder, sharing the bed, that kind of thing.

So after a beat Xander grabbed Spike’s hand and interlaced their fingers, resting their hands against his leg. Spike didn’t react immediately, but after a second he squeezed Xander’s hand.

“I think that’s an excellent point, Andrew,” Nigel was saying. Xander blinked and looked up.

“Thank you,” Andrew said. He smiled at Nigel.

Spike squeezed Xander’s hand again, making sure that he had his attention before sniffing the air and then looking between Andrew and Nigel.

“Oh, no,” Xander whispered. “No. You’ve got to be kidding me.”

Spike touched his tongue to the back of his teeth with a knowing grin. It was one hundred percent Spike-i-tude, like he had stepped fully back into his skin for that moment, and it took Xander’s breath away.

“I’m sorry; did you want to share something with the rest of us?” Andrew asked them impatiently.

Everyone swiveled in their chairs to look in Xander’s direction.

“Yeah, uh . . . no. That’d be a big ‘no way’,” Xander said.

“Xander, we’re talking later,” Buffy interrupted.

“No objections here,” Xander answered.

“Great.” Buffy drummed her fingers against the receiver, and they all leaned away from the feedback coming from the speaker. “I guess the part I still want to cover, and that we might as well take up while Angel’s on the line, is why this is taking so long.”

“The meeting?” Lydia yawned.

“No. The not remembering,” Buffy answered.

“That’s . . .” Xander took a sharp breath. “Look, I’ve got to say I’m surprised, Buff. You were all about the patience when this thing started.”

She made a frustrated noise. “I mean, I know I said that to take it day by day, and that he’d already come a long way from when he showed up. But now that he’s started to remember, I guess I thought . . . you know. The adjustment. The not-speaking. The memory loss. The . . . the _Spike_.”

Andrew scribbled something down.

“Buffy . . .” Angel said. “Even if Spike has started to remember some part of what happened to him, wherever he was, what’s going on now isn’t a temporary situation that’ll fade away in a few weeks.”

“I know that,” Buffy cut him off.

“No, I don’t know that you do.”

Nigel opened his mouth, and Xander rushed to speak. “You’re saying this, whatever happened between Spike burning up on the Hellmouth and now; it’s going to affect Spike for a while.”

“That’s part of it,” Angel said.

“You mean the soul,” Xander said suddenly. “You think it’s connected, not just the memories he’s got of pain, but also reacting to the soul-having?”

“Exactly.”

“But he was fine,” Buffy insisted. “Yes, in Sunnydale, he went through a tough period, and there was badness while we figured out what was happening. But at the end --”

“You’re going to have to realize that Spike’s adjustment to having the soul is a longer process than what you saw,” Angel said with finality.

“Because it took you such a long time,” Andrew suggested helpfully to the speaker.

There was radio silence for a moment before Angel spoke again. “Since it took me a hundred years to get a handle on what I needed to do, yes, I think I can say that it would have taken Spike more than a few months to find some balance.”

“Well, we still don’t know for sure what Spike was going through, where he was,” Nigel began. “Can you really offer input on this when you aren’t certain about his particular circumstances?”

“My best guess? He was in hell,” Angel said shortly.

“I’m sorry; what?” Buffy asked.

“Where else would he have been?” Angel responded. “All he remembers is pain, right? And that’d fit right in with my experience there.”

“Ah,” Nigel said to himself. He regarded Spike again with open curiosity. When Xander stared at him, he looked away.

“It would make sense,” Buffy commented slowly. “The impact of what could have happened there. The amnesia, not being able to--.”

“Fuck,” Xander said under his breath. He didn’t realize how hard he was holding Spike’s hand until Spike looked down and Xander followed his gaze to his own whitened knuckles.

“Xander --” Angel said.

“If this is too much --” Buffy said at the same time.

“It’s not too much,” Xander said. He couldn’t keep his voice from getting louder. “You wanted me to handle this, and this is me handling it. Handling Spike.”

“Not literally, one would assume,” Nigel murmured with a small smile.

“Who invite this guy again?” Lydia asked the table.

“Andrew,” Xander answered her.

“Just because they are fucking,” Lydia said dismissively.

“Oh god.” Andrew’s eyes closed.

“Perhaps I had best leave now,” Nigel said, gathering his things. Despite his deference to the news, he looked completely unembarrassed, and as he left the room he gave them all a professional nod.

“Andrew, you’re sleeping with _Nigel_?” Buffy asked. “In what kind of universe did you think that would be okay?”

“You aren’t running a very big organization over there, are you?” Angel asked. “I mean, if both Xander and Andrew have to go after the same guys.”

“Well, we don’t actually _have_ to,” Xander noted.

“All right, this is getting way too off topic,” Buffy said. “Xander, I’ll talk to you later. Angel . . . it was helpful, hearing from you. And Andrew, you’ve got some explaining to do later.” There was a click, and she was gone.

“Xander, if you need to touch base another time, I’m available,” Angel said. “But probably one on one would work better. In fact, maybe if I were to come to town sometime . . . ”

“Oh, uh . . .” Xander glanced at Spike, but Spike was no longer even pretending to pay attention to the disembodied voices, only watching Xander. “You don’t need to do that.”

“We’ll play it by ear.” And Angel was gone.

“Well. Should we recap?” Andrew asked in a small voice.

“We’re leaving,” Xander said. He stood, and Spike stood alongside him. Lydia was already on her feet and headed for the door.

“Xander,” Andrew called after him.

“What?” Xander stopped, but he didn’t bother untangling his hand from Spike’s. Andrew’s gaze went right to their hands and then darted away.

“I’m sorry,” Andrew said. “I should have said something. About what’s been going on. It’s just that--”

Xander shook his head. “No, I get the weirdness. But Nigel . . . I just don’t know if he’s such a hot choice for you, guy-wise.”

Andrew stood, stacked his notepad on top of his folders and shrugged. “I’m not stupid, Xander. I know he isn’t really into me so much as . . . it’s just been a while.” He put his pen on top of the pile and then sat down again in his chair.

“I hear you.” When Spike tugged at Xander slightly, Xander nodded in acknowledgement. “Just be careful,” he added to Andrew.

“Yeah.” Andrew didn’t look up as Spike and Xander left.


End file.
